"Growth is the work of creative personalities and creative minorities; they cannot go on moving forward themselves unless they can contrive to carry their fellows with them in their advance; and the uncreative rank and file of mankind, which is always the overwhelming majority, cannot be transfigured en masse and raised to the stature of their leaders in the twinkling of an eye. That would be in practice impossible; for the inward spiritual grace through which an unillumined soul is fired by communion with a saint is almost as rare as the miracle that has brought the saint himself into the world. The leader's task is to make his fellows his followers; and the only means by which mankind in the mass can be set in motion towards a goal beyond itself is by enlisting the primitive and universal faculty of mimesis. For this mimesis is a kind of social drill; and the dull ears that are deaf to the unearthly music of Orpheus' lyre are well attuned to the drill sergeant's word of command. When the Piper of Hamelin assumes king Frederick William's Prussian voice, the rank and file, who have stood stolid hitherto, mechanically break into movement, and the evolution which he causes them to execute bring them duly to heel; by they can only catch him up by taking a short cut, and they can only find room to march in formation by deploying on the broad way which leadeth to destruction. When they road to destruction has perforce to be trodden on the quest of life, it is perhaps no wonder that the quest should often end in disaster.
"Moreover, there is a weakness in the actual exercise of mimesis, quite apart from the way in which the faculty may be exploited. For, just because mimesis is a kind of drill, it is a kind of mechanization of human life and movement.
"When we speak of 'an ingenious' mechanism' or 'a skilled mechanic', the words call up the idea of a triumph of life over matter, of human skill over physical obstacles. Concrete examples suggest the same idea, from the gramophone or the aeroplane back to the first wheel and the first dug-out canoe; for such inventions have extended man's power over his environment by so manipulating inanimate objects that they are made to carry out human purposes, as the drill sergeant's commands are executed by his mechanized human beings. In drilling his platoon the sergeant expands himself into a Briareus whose hundred arms and legs obey his will almost as promptly as if they had been organically his own. Similarly the telescope is an extension of the human eye, the trumpet of the human voice, the stilt of the human leg, the sword of the human arm.
"Nature has implicitly complimented man on his ingenuity by anticipating him in his use of mechanical devices. She has made extensive use of them in her chef-d'oeuvre, the human body. In the heart and the lungs she has constructed two self-regulating machines that are models of their kind. By adjusting these and other organs so that they work automatically, Nature has released the margin of our energies from the monotonously repetitive task these organs perform, and has set these energies free to walk and talk and, in a word, bring into existence twenty-one civilizations! She has arranged that, say, ninety per cent. of the functions of any given organism shall be performed automatically and therefore with the minimum expenditure of energy, in order that the maximum amount of energy may be concentrated on the remaining ten per cent., in which Nature is feeling her way towards a fresh advance. In fact, a natural organism is made up, like a human society, of a creative minority and an uncreative majority of 'members'; and in a growing and healthy organism, as in a growing and healthy society, the majority is drilled into following the minority's lead mechanically.
"But, when he have lost ourselves in admiration of these natural and human mechanical triumphs, it is disconcerting to be reminded that there are other phrases--'machine-made goods', 'mechanical behavior'--in which the connotation of the word 'machine' is exactly the reverse, suggesting not the triumph of life over matter by the triumph of matter over life. Though machinery be designed to be the slave of man, it is also possible for man to become the slave of his machines. A living organism which is ninety per cent. mechanism will have greater opportunity or capacity for creativity than an organism which is fifty per cent. mechanism, as Socrates will have more time and opportunity to discover the secret of the Universe if he has not got to cook his own meals, but the organism that is a hundred per cent. mechanism is a robot.
"Thus a risk of catastrophe is inherent in the use of the faculty of mimesis which is the vehicle of mechanization in the social relationships of human beings; and it is evident that this risk will be greater when mimesis is called into play in a society which is in dynamic movement than in a society which is in a state of rest. The weakness of mimesis lies in its being a mechanical response to a suggestion from outside, so that the action performed is one which would never have been performed by the performer on his own initiative. Thus mimesis-action is not self-determined, and the best safeguard for its performance is that the faculty should become crystallized in habit of custom--as it actually is in primitive societies in the Yin-state. But when the 'cake of custom' is broken, the faculty of mimesis, hitherto directed backwards towards elders or ancestors as incarnations of an unchanging social tradition, is reoriented towards creative personalities bent upon leading their fellows with them towards a promised land. henceforth the growing society is compelled to live dangerously. Moreover the danger is perpetually imminent, since the condition which is required for the maintenance of growth is a perpetual flexibility and spontaneity, whereas the condition required for effective mimesis, which is itself a prerequisite for growth, is a considerable degree of machine-like automatism. The second of these requirements was what Walter Bagehot had in mind when, in his whimsical way he told his English readers that they owed their comparative successfulness as a nation in larger part to their stupidity. Good leaders, yes: but t he good leaders would not have had good followers if the majority of these followers had determined to think everything out for themselves. And yet, if all are 'stupid', where will be the leadership?
"In fact, creative personalities in the vanguard of a civilization who have recourse to the mechanism of mimesis are exposing themselves to the risk of failure in two degrees, one negative and the other positive.
"The possible negative failure is that the leaders may infect themselves with the hypnotism which they have induced in their followers. In that event, the docility of the rank and file will have been purchased at the disastrous price of a loss of initiative in the officers. This is what happened in the arrested civilizations, and in all periods in the histories of other civilizations which are to be regarded as periods of stagnation. This negative failure, however, is not usually the end of the story. When the leaders cease to lead, their tenure of power becomes an abuse. The rank and file mutiny; the officers seek to restore order by drastic action. Orpheus, who has lost his lyre or forgotten how to play it, now lays about him with Xerxes' whip; and the result is a hideous pandemonium, in which the military formation breaks down into anarchy. This is the positive failure; and we have already, again and again, used another name for it. It is that 'disintegration' of a broken-down civilization which declares itself in the 'secession of the proletariat' from a band of leaders who have degenerated into a 'dominant minority'.
"This secession of the led from the leaders may be regarded as a loss of harmony between the parts which make up the whole ensemble of the society. In any whole consisting of parts a loss of harmony between the parts is paid for by the whole in a corresponding loss of self-determination. This loss of self-determination is the ultimate criterion of breakdown; and it is a conclusion which should not surprise us, seeing that it is the inverse of the conclusion, reached in an earlier part of this Study, that progress towards self-determination is the criterion of growth. We have not to examine some of the forms in which this loss of self-determination through loss of harmony is manifested." (pp. 321 - 324)
From Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History: Volume One (abridged)
